Metallized plastic substrates have found applications in the shielding of interfering radiation such as electromagnetic interfering (EMI) radiation of for example electronic equipment.
Shielding is used either to protect an electronic equipment against external interfering radiation or to protect the environment from radiation generated by the electronic equipment itself.
Several techniques to metallize a plastic substrate are known in the art. Such techniques comprise for example the application of a conductive paint or the application of a coating by chemical processes such as immersion plating or electroless plating, electroplating, chemical vapour deposition, vacuum evaporation or sputtering.
Most of these coating techniques result in an expensive and complicated process.
Therefore, regarding the increasing need for metallized substrates, there is still a big demand for a simple and cheap method to produce metallized substrates.
Since the metallized substrate has to be formed into an object sized and shaped to enclose an electronic equipment, the metallized substrate shall have a high deformability.
WO 99/40770 describes a method of fabricating a support provided with shielding characteristics against interfering radiation. A tin layer is electrolytically applied on a plastic substrate. The thus obtained metallized plastic is placed in an injection mould and plastic is injected into the mould to form the support.
A drawback of the articles obtained by this method is their high cost since the application of a metal coating by electrolysis is an expensive process.